There are many instances in which it is desired to provide a potential recipient with various data. For exemplary purposes only, at a trade show for example, vendors often print significant amounts of advertising material, technical information and other data relative to the products or services they are selling. Generally speaking, this information is specific to a particular product, a particular display, trade show location or trade show being attended. Once the trade show is over, the information is sometimes outdated and not used again. Printing such information is very expensive and time-consuming. Further, a vendor typically does not have the ability to print all of the information they would like to give to a potential customer or consumer/information seeker and must restrict the information they provide based on time, space or budgetary constraints.
When a vendor does print material, there is often a significant amount of material that must be given out to a potential customer. Oftentimes customers have large bags full of material they receive from multiple vendors. This information is bulky and often difficult to transport back to the recipient's home, office or hotel room to be viewed at the recipient's convenience.
Some vendors have tried to circumvent this problem by providing information in a portable electronic means such as a CD-ROM or videocassette. Although this may be an improvement over providing printed information, there are still many restrictions with this form of data dissemination in that there is a significant time and cost involved in preparing certain information and transferring it to the media. Further, the media has an associated cost that is not always insignificant. In addition, once the event has transpired, the previously prepared media often cannot be used again and is therefore wasted.
Accordingly, there is a long felt need for a system and method which can easily, quickly and at very low cost provide data and other information to a recipient utilizing stored data which is transferred to a portable receiving device which is carried by the recipient upon request by the recipient.